Those reading this, probably have never seen or experienced some things like:

1. Live grenades going off don’t set off a fireball explosion like seen in the movies, they blow up and send fragments of metal all over the place.
2. However, when you see napalm dropped in the movies, it is exactly like that. I witnessed this right outside of our camp. But not dropped by jets as jets flew too fast to hit the targets. They were dropped by slower propeller planes.
3. When you see a bunch of helicopters flying in formation, it was like that. But there mostly were preludes that you don’t see. When there are a bunch of them, mostly it was pre-planned.

First, the enemy positions were determined by intelligence, then sometimes probes were sent out. I was at a French Rubber plantation at Quan Loi, up toward the Cambodian border for about six weeks. My job was getting fuel out of Saigon and refueling helicopters.

The first time, the V.C. were located, then we had a lineup of maybe 15 helicopters, one behind the other, all fueled and ready to go. There would be about eight combat soldiers sitting next to a helicopter (I have forgotten the details). Then more soldiers would be sent out to the suspected VC area on APCs (armored personnel carriers), in my opinion, they were bait and were sitting ducks.

When the first shot was fired from the V.C. the helicopters fired up, the troops got in them and they took off, one after another. After about 2 hours, the helicopters went out again and started bringing back the dead and the wounded. Each time, it was around 35 dead, I don’t know how many were wounded. This happened 3 times, each time with around 3 dozen dead troops. Once I looked them over (we had canvas around them, so as not to demoralize the living troops) and I thought, look at all these dead soldiers and their loved ones don’t even know it yet, but in a few days they certainly will.

On one of these occasions, there was what I thought was a dead VC lying there with our dead troops, as I walked by, he started to move around. It scared the living devil out of me, it was a shock. I then asked the sergeant what he doing in there. The reply was, “Oh he has a bullet in his head and he is going to die anyway, so we didn’t know what to do with him, so we threw him in here.” Sometimes when you don’t know the person, some just became calloused.

Again, politicians stay home and send boys to fight the wars.

Roger Gregory is a Vietnam veteran, serving in the 1st Infantry Division and is a business owner in Priest River.